‘A Culture Of Love Versus The Politics Of Fear.’
A lecture I will give at the Emmanuel Centre today
To be human is for our hearts to beat with the desire to love and be loved.
If there is a single universal rule of ethical human conduct recognized by the whole of humanity, it is that ‘we ought to love our neighbours as ourselves’.
The greatest threat to our love of our neighbour is our fear of our neighbour.
It is because many Aussies fear asylum seekers, we are unable to treat them the way we would like to be treated if we were seeking asylum ourselves.
Aussies have a primal historical/hysterical fear of ‘boat people’ coming to our country and dispossessing us, because our forebears came to this country as ‘boat people’ and dispossessed the people who lived in this country before us, and we fear that the next wave of boat people may do the same to us.
Aussie anthropologist, Ghassan Hage, says Aussies are afraid that if we took the land we live in, others may want to take it too. He says that Aussies have an underlying fear of revenge for the genocide our ancestors committed, de-colonisation by aborigines, and/or re-colonisation by migrants and refugees.
That underlying fear has been exacerbated by the fact that so many of the boat people are Muslim. Muslims have lived peacefully in Australia for more than two hundred years, but when, on 9/11, the Twin Towers were destroyed so spectacularly and catastrophically, painful ancient memories of a thousand years of on-again off-again conflict between Muslims and Christians exploded into our public consciousness. Muslim boat people have been repeatedly represented as the precursors of an ‘Islamic invasion’. And, consequently, ‘as antisemitism was a unifying factor in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century.”
https://www.facebook.com/dave.andrews.7927/posts/10155269150081972

May your Christmas be blessed.